Life is Short: The Collected Short Fiction of Shawn Inmon

by Shawn Inmon

  Even though it was still mid-afternoon, I gave up and headed for home. After about twenty minutes of sweaty, dusty hiking, I let the screen door slam behind me on the oven that we called home.Mom poked her head around the corner of the kitchen. “Are you okay? Do I need to get the Bactine out?”

  The only time I ever came home this early was when I got hurt; scraped my leg while climbing rocks, perhaps, or cut my hand on a rusty fence. Somewhere in America, I suspect that kids got tetanus shots for things like that. At my house, Bactine and Band-Aids cured all.

  “No, I’m fine. Just bored, I guess.” This critical error escaped my lips before I could stop it. Before I could move, my mother smiled and dropped a roll of paper towels and the Windex on the kitchen table. “Bored? Good. This will un-bore you. Do all the windows inside and out, then report back to me. I’ve got a list ready for you.”

  I scrunched up my face in regret at my foolishness, but obediently picked up my new tools of the trade. “Pretty sure I’ll be un-bored by the time I’m done with the windows.”

  Mom nodded, her dyed-red hair formed into stiff curls and waves above her penciled-on eyebrows. She might not have been a fashion queen, but she was a pro when it came to negotiating with kids—she always did so from a position of power.

  As I moved toward the back door, I noticed the glass of clear liquid and ice on the counter, condensation running down the side of the glass. I didn’t need to taste it to know what was in the glass. Vodka.

  Mom hadn’t drunk much until Dad died in 1965. Everything changed after that. We lost our farm and moved into a trailer in town. A few years later, she had married Robert. I liked him okay except for the fights.

  The fights didn’t start immediately after they got married. In fact, there was a peaceful honeymoon year between the wedding and the first fist-fest. They didn’t happen every month or even every few months, but they always came back. In the meantime, we moved where the work was.

  Three more moves in the next two years had led us to Huntington, me to hot dusty days of exploration, and my mother to midday glasses of iced vodka.

  When I finished inspecting the cleaned windows for streaks, I threw away my paper towels and put away the Windex. “I want a butterfly net,” I announced.

  That was enough to draw her attention away from whatever was on the stove. “What brought that on?”

  “I’ve just been seeing some pretty cool butterflies around.” I didn’t yet dare utter the Monarch's name. I wanted to keep that just for me. “I thought it would be cool to collect some of them.”

  She took a deep pull on her cigarette, paused, then nodded. “I know it’s a little boring for you here. School will be started in a few months, and things will be better then.”

  School was eight weeks away, several eternities to me.

  “I don’t think they’re very much. Can we look at the dime store next time we go to Weiser?” Pronounced "wheezer," it was the nearest town of any size and it always seemed exotic to me. For one, it was in Idaho, a completely different state. The next nearest exotic location was Ontario, still in Oregon, but in a different time zone.

  “Would you be willing to give up your allowance for a month to get one?”

  She was a tough negotiator. My allowance for doing chores around the house was one dollar per week, just enough to keep me in BBs. I swallowed hard, but thought of those golden and black wings floating above me. I calculated the number of tubes of BBs in my dresser arsenal and did a little math. If I rationed them carefully, I could get by. I nodded.

  “No promises, but I’ll look.”

  Good enough for me.

  Over the next few days, I tried to forget about the idea of trying to capture a Monarch. My interests went back toward recreating The Battle of the Little Big Horn, or hiding inside a ditch and replaying the Battle of the Bulge, or imagining my BB gun was a futuristic ray gun. Even though I didn’t see another Monarch, my mind kept wandering back to it. I began to wonder if that one lovely butterfly hadn’t been some sort of an anomaly, a castaway blown off course by a hot wind. In addition to blowing dust, Huntington was wealthy in hot wind.

  For the moment, I started my bug collection using an old half-gallon Mason jar I found on our back porch. Many of the insects in Huntington were enormous, like mutants from a fifties horror movie just beginning to transform into gigantic monsters. That had applied to the dragonflies I had so casually shot, and it certainly applied to the gigantic grasshoppers.

  Those freaked me out a little bit. In Mossyrock, grasshoppers were cute little bugs, just a little larger than crickets. I caught them in my cupped hands, felt them banging around inside that fleshy prison, then I would open my palms so they could jump away. In Huntington, the grasshoppers wouldn’t have begun to fit inside my hands, if I’d had the courage to grab onto one of them, which I didn’t. There was something malevolent and unknown about the giant jumpers, perhaps large enough to bite back. They made a loud clacking sound as they jumped and looked almost prehistoric, as though they were unchanged since 10,000,000 BC.

  They were not easy to catch. I carried my glass jar with me everywhere for a few days, but never corralled a super grasshopper. Scorpions were easier; even though I knew they were poisonous, they didn’t scare me nearly as badly as the prehistoric grasshoppers. Even when the scorpions skittered toward me on full alert, tails raised to deliver a deadly payload, I knew they could not leap up and attack my face. I caught a number of scorpions, but they never felt like prizes. The Monarch still eluded my sight, much less my Mason jar.

  Robert’s work truck wasn’t in front of the apartment, which meant he was working late again. I stepped inside to the smells of hamburger, onions, and chili powder. Chili burgers. And chili burgers meant one thing: that Mom had been to town. I don’t know why she always made chili burgers on days she went to town, but she did.

  “Smells good,” I said, as I wandered into the kitchen. I wanted to shout, “Did you get me my butterfly net?” but I was too savvy for that.

  Mom ignored me for a moment, then: “Did you look on your bed?”

  Approximately one tenth of a second later, I was in my bedroom, staring down at a dream. The net was covered in colorful cardboard, showing a disheveled nutty-professor type with a long flowing beard, chasing after a cloud of butterflies swirling above his head. Across the top, it read, “Professor Wilderness’s Wonder Net.” A gold star surrounded the words, “Now with reinforced netting!” The long wooden handle was a plain dowel.

  It was beautiful.

  I picked it up, ran into the kitchen, hugged Mom and said, “I’ll be back!”

  “Oh, no, you don’t. You’ll be right here until after dinner. Dad will be home any minute, then we’re going to eat.”

  She had been calling Robert “Dad” for a while, but I had my doubts about whether it was going to stick. I wasn’t sure of Robert's proper title, but I knew Dad was dead.

  Happy just to have my net, I said “Okay” and sat down on the couch to ease the net from the cardboard packaging. It would be disastrous to damage the “reinforced netting” before I had even caught my first butterfly. I stood in the living room, swooshing the net back and forth, up and down, trying to get a feel for its weight.

  As I was doing this little butterfly ballet, Robert walked in, lunchbox in hand, covered in dust from top to bottom. He stopped in the door and stared at the strange young creature waving a net, this child he had somehow inherited. After a moment he nodded at me, then went into the kitchen. When he walked back through the living room to take his shower, I was sitting on the couch watching the Huntley-Brinkley report.

  As soon as dinner was over, I was gone like a shot. While the Monarch was my main quarry, I was open to capturing anything that flew into my path. Even though I had seen a grand total of one Monarch butterfly since I had lived there, I was sure as soon as I had the net in my hand, they would surround me like they did in the picture of Professor Wilderness. Once again, my fantasy life and real
ity failed to align. I didn’t see so much as a common moth on my trek around the neighborhood.

  Still, as the porch lights came on and I knew it was time to go home, I wasn’t discouraged. Maybe they don’t come out at night. Maybe they like the heat. Yeah, that must be it. I’ll get one tomorrow.

  Of course, I didn’t get one the next day, or the next, or the next. The net was very helpful in capturing the grasshoppers, though, and I soon had caught my fill of them. I picked out one particularly large specimen, managed to transfer it into my jar without having to actually touch it, and made my way home.

  “Okay, Mom,” I said as I bounded through the front door, “I’ve started my collection. What do I do with him?”

  Mom took the dirty, smudged jar and peered inside at the quivering mutant insect. She gave a small shudder. “Throw it away?”

  My expression told her that wasn’t going to be good enough. She sighed, then opened the cupboard under the sink, moved things around, then produced a small brown bottle with a peeling white label that read “ether.”

  She walked to the bathroom and came back with a cotton ball. She poured some of the ether onto the cotton, opened the lid a crack and dropped it in. The grasshopper tensed and jumped, producing only an unnerving noise when it clicked against the top of the jar. After a few more jumps, it sat still on the bottom and was quiet.

  “Leave it in there with the cotton ball for an hour or so, then we can mount it on some cardboard.”

  Mount it. That sounds like an official, hobby-type word. I like it.

  An hour later, I returned to examine it. Eyes large, I stared at the quiet husk of bug that lay on the bottom of the jar. I began to suspect that I had picked the wrong hobby. After a few apprehensive moments I plucked up my courage, opened the lid, and turned the jar upside down. The grasshopper and cotton ball fell out onto the table. Even in death’s repose, the bug freaked me out. I went into Mom’s sewing kit and retrieved the fabric measuring tape. With morbid curiosity, I stretched it out beside the bug.

  Four inches. Damn.

  Okay, I admit, a dead grasshopper measuring 4" isn’t exactly Creature Features material, but it still bugged me.

  I found an old cardboard box on the back porch and tore the bottom away. I steeled myself and picked up the grasshopper. For being so large, it was incredibly light. I understood how they made their prodigious jumps. Saying a small prayer and hoping I wasn’t committing some sort of unknown mortal sin, I pinned it to the cardboard.

  That night, I sat the cardboard on my dresser and went to bed. If karma were instant, my dreams would have been haunted by 6' tall bugs swarming after me. Karma is not instant, though, and I slept like the mostly innocent boy I was.

  Over the next few weeks, I added a few more bugs to my cardboard display. A reddish scorpion added a nice touch. I even added several butterflies. That was all fine, as far as it went, but my heart’s desire evaded me. After many hours of hunting them, I still had not come within three feet of actually catching a Monarch.

  Logic tells me that there were a number of Monarch butterflies in the vicinity of Huntington, Oregon, that summer. I never saw more than one at a time, though, and so they all became one in my mind. One elusive, uncatchable dream.

  After a month, my bargained-away allowance ban expired, and I regained my dollar a week. That meant I could buy a few tubes of BBs at the store, and I resumed my trips to the abandoned junkyard. At first, I carried both my BB gun and my butterfly net with me. I even managed to incorporate the net into a few of my battle fantasies. Although I never stopped thinking and dreaming about catching a Monarch, eventually Professor Wilderness’s Wonder Net ended up leaning against the back of my tiny closet.

  In August, a new family moved into the vacant apartment next door. They had a boy who would also be in fifth grade that coming year. His name was Jimmy, and we became fast summertime friends. For the last few weeks before school, we spent most days together. The first time he came into my room and saw my pinned-up bug collection, he was impressed as only a ten-year-old boy can be at the prodigious wealth of dead insects.

  He didn’t have a real BB gun, but we took turns sharing mine. I showed him the small pond, dried up by the dog days of August, where I had killed the two dragonflies with a single shot. I could tell he didn’t really believe my story, and I didn’t blame him.

  Just a few days before school started, I was taking the kitchen garbage to the oversized bin. It was late evening, already half dark, and it had started to cool down to near-pleasant levels. I flipped the paper bag of garbage into the large bin, then froze.

  Ten feet ahead, between me and our back door, was a Monarch sitting on a bush. I took a single step toward it. Its wings quivered as though it was going to take flight, but it didn’t. I thought longingly of the Wonder Net, buried in the back of my closet. If I tried to sneak past it to retrieve the net, it would be gone.

  After a long moment’s hesitation, I came up with a plan. I stuck my hands in my shorts pockets and backed slowly away. I think I might have even whistled an innocent tune. My eyes didn’t leave the butterfly as I backed away until I disappeared around the corner of the building. I sprinted to the front door, burst through it, and ran to my room.

  I grabbed the net, ran through the kitchen and almost over Mom, who was finishing the dishes. “Sorry!” I stage-whispered over my shoulder as I tiptoed through our porch and onto the back steps. I was sure the Monarch was gone. In fact, I was already doubting whether I had really seen it at all.

  It was still there, but as I took two steps toward it, it lifted skyward. Instead of going straight up, though, it flew at an angle toward me. I took two long strides, jumped, and swung my net blindly, crashing it to the ground.

  I looked up, knowing I would see it fluttering away.

  It wasn’t in the sky.

  It was in my net.

  Carefully, I pooched the net around the butterfly and held it closed at the bottom. I carried it into the house. My hands were shaking. I’d never set and met a goal before. I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel.

  “Mom! Look!” I held the net in front of me.

  “Well, you finally got him, hmm? Okay. You stay there.”

  A moment later she reappeared with a wide-mouthed mason jar with an ether-soaked cotton ball resting on the bottom.

  “Okay, drop him in.”

  I hesitated. I looked at the delicate wings, the insectoid eyes, the vibrant colors. Any person with an ounce of compassion or appreciation of beauty would have taken the net outside and let it go.

  I dropped the Monarch to its doom inside the Mason jar.

  “Okay, go to bed now. It’s getting late. When you get up in the morning, we’ll fix a special display for it. You can take it to school next week and show your teacher.”

  I nodded, a little numb inside, though not as numb as the perfect Monarch asphyxiating at the bottom of the jar.

  I went to my room, stripped down to my tighty-whiteys and slipped under the sheet.

  It took me a long time to go to sleep that night, but when I did, I didn’t have any dreams I can remember.

  As soon as I woke up the next day, I ran to the kitchen.

  The Monarch lay motionless on its side, its beauty unmarred.

  My throat was thick. If I had to speak at that moment, I knew I would break down and cry.

  It was wrong to kill this little piece of technicolor in a sepia world, but I had done it anyway. I’d had a goal, however childish, and I had followed it through. Looking down at the sad little body, I felt only guilt.

  I picked up the jar and carried it to the garbage bin outside. I opened the lid, smelled the familiar sweet-sick odor of the ether, and let the once-perfect butterfly slide away.

  I whispered, “I’m sorry,” but the words rang hollow in my own ears.

  I was outside in just my underwear, but I went back into the house and retrieved the cardboard with my other bugs. I threw that into the trash bin as well.
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br />   I don’t know why I had to kill something so lovely before I learned why it was wrong. I lived with sporadic domestic violence. Was that violence becoming part of me, too? Did I really need to kill things?

  Now I knew that answer. The incident had shattered the callous selfishness of bored boyhood.

  Forty-six years later, and married to a woman deathly afraid of spiders, I capture them in my hands and put them safely outside.

  And, when I see a lovely Monarch butterfly, floating like a delicate burst of color, high against a blue sky, I still feel a twinge of guilt.

  Author’s Note for My Monarch Summer

  I got my start as a writer as a memoirist, mining my life for a story I thought others might find interesting. After writing two of them, though, I felt tapped out and turned my attention to fiction. I didn’t write another memoir piece until I sat down to do original stories for this collection. Then, this was the first story in my mind, waiting to get out.

  I know it’s a small story – a boy, a butterfly – but we all tend to see childhood memories in a haze, and I wanted to sharpen and focus in on this one little period of time, and my lessons learned.

  My Matanuska Summer

  “Here ya go,” Bobby squeaked, sounding like a burst of helium from a balloon. He held the joint out. Smoke curled from the tip, beckoning me.

  I knew this moment would arrive. Just didn’t know it would be right this second. What do I do? Uhh…

  It was June 10, 1976. I was sixteen years old, sitting at the end of a tatty L-shaped sectional in my older brother Mickey’s apartment in Seward, Alaska. My plane had touched down from Seattle less than five hours earlier. I was not ready to face an unexpected life decision.

  Time slowed. Four older guys sat around the couch, looking at me with mild curiosity.

  The decision weighed on me more than for most. Five years earlier, seeing what addiction had done to the rest of my family, I had decided never to take that first drink. If I never have a first drink, I had thought, I’ll never become an alcoholic. As the years passed, that vow had gone unchallenged. I was a nerdy kid who didn’t get invited to parties, and the friends I hung out with didn’t drink or smoke either. Easy, right?